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'Without Corn, There Is No Country:' Native Maize Revitalization in Guadalajara

As part of the National Day of the Corn events on Sunday, Sept. 29, from a cornfield planted in the median of one of the city’s biggest thoroughfares in center of Guadalajara, Mexico, the Colectivo Coamil Federalismo—an autonomous project focused on urban agriculture—demanded the protection of corn at the national level. Through a cultural and […]

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The Indigenous Growers Reviving Hemp’s Deep Roots... on the Banks of Wounded Knee Creek

On the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, a dream died in 1890 in a brutal massacre. Today, 110 years later, on that same creek, a dream was born. That’s the work that Alex White Plume, traditional leader and former tribal president of the Oglala Lakota, and his family began: the hemp economy. For this they faced […]

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Sowing Sovereignty: Reclaiming Indigenous Agriculture in North Dakota

Grandfather’s vision about ‘gallons and gallons’ of Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara seeds nurtures tribal college food sovereignty project. Dr. Ruth Plenty Sweetgrass-She Kills recalls when her grandfather, Gerard Baker, shared with her some seeds – and his dream that they would multiply. “His wish was that there would be gallons and gallons of jars of these seeds […]

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Healing the body and the land on Lake Chapala, Mexico

Women of town plagued with water pollution, kidney disease and poor healthcare options turn to growing their own medicine

Faced with a public health crisis due to kidney disease in the region, a group of women organized in Agua Caliente – on the shores of Mexico’s largest lake, Chapala, in the municipality of Poncitlán, Jalisco – to launch a community garden of medicinal plants. Although there are factors beyond their control, these women are counting on their collective organization around a budding agroecology project, to help them care for their health.

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Oaxaca Mural Documents Struggle to Defend Native Corn

Inauguration celebrates Milpa culture, Supreme Court decision banning cultivation of transgenic corn in Mexico

In a noisy entrance to one of the oldest markets in Oaxaca City, not far from one of the sites where corn culture originated  9,000 years ago, muralist Mariel García stood on a scaffold in the hot sun for three weeks and painted her heart out. The mural she was creating, more than a year […]

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Agroecology Center revalues agriculture - and culture - in Oaxaca

Centro Santa Cruz teaches children to plant, heal the soil, care for the Earth, and enjoy their native traditions

Ixtepec, Oaxaca – It is morning, and the sun’s rays have barely come out. And at the Santa Cruz Agroecological and Cultural Center, an independent space located in the Zapata neighborhood in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, there is already a bustle of girls and boys eager to learn how to make compost, plant a garden and care […]

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Tikkun Eco Center : Spreading seeds of change

Creating resilient community through water harvesting in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, MÉXICO – Victoria Collier and Ben Ptashnik are a couple with a vision: they want to teach how to create self-sustaining ecological community where people can grow food, disengage from destructive systems with the use of renewable energy and green building, and create community projects that benefit everyone while raising the […]

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Planting Agroecology in the Sacred Desert of Wirikuta

Renovating the Candles of Life Through Regenerative Agriculture

I was witnessing the first stone in a long-term project that seeks to restore and regenerate the desert in what many have come to call the “botanical garden” of Wirikuta. And as I watched this dream come to life, I was reminded of the symbolic Candles of Life, renovated every year in the pilgrimages carried out by the Wixárika people for whom this land holds a central place in their cosmology.

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Mexico scores historic legal victory in defense of native corn

Mexican Supreme Court ratifies restraining order for protection from contamination by GMOs

The Supreme Court of Mexico announced two decisions that protect the human right to corn biodiversity — banning permits to sow genetically modified corn in Mexico. That right was challenged in court by the transnationals Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer-Dupont, and Dow Agrosciences.

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Winona LaDuke: Return to Rice Lake

Anishinaabe celebration welcomes runners honoring — and protecting — the sacred manoomin

It’s Rice Lake Village on the White Earth Reservation – at the site of the mother lode of wild rice, Lower Rice Lake. Lew Murray stands in front of the gathering — about 200 or so people.

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Native hemp farming, opportunity to lead New Green Revolution

Academics join Winona LaDuke and other Indigenous innovators to forge carbon-friendly economy

This fall, when we bring in the sheaves, they will be of hemp. Then we’ll have a harvest hoedown to follow up.

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Mexico Makes Strides in Agroecology

The Agroecological Advances of Mexico's 4T Government

Sept. 8, 2016, was a tragic day. At a massive event on that day, Enrique Peña Nieto, president of the country, dramatically announced that he was a daily consumer of Coca~Cola. His words were celebrated with applause and laughter by businessmen and officials who listened to him; meanwhile, 6.4 million citizens were suffering from diabetes, […]

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The Plot Thickens in Mexico's Glyphosate War

Presidential decree for a gradual withdrawal of the possible carcinogen and prohibition of GM corn comes under attack.

Three of the greatest battles that humanity is fighting are: The Covid-19 pandemic; The climate crisis, which increasingly threatens the survival of the species; and Gigantic areas of GM soy, corn, cotton and glyphosate, the poison that accompanies them, planted in blood and fire by six powerful agri-food corporations. To give the reader an idea, here is […]

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Putting the Heart Back in the Valley by Putting the Fire Back in the Ground

A place-based, indigenous approach to ecological restoration in eastern Oregon

“Restoration of habitats and regenerative, localized food production need to be foundational in our economies moving forward. We should be turning resources towards these efforts with the same vigor the destruction and depletion was carried out with. Sucking the life out of our lands while polluting the water to grow human fodder void of nutrition […]

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A Natural Alliance: Science + Indigenous Wisdom

The powerful alliance between integrated science and traditional food systems

The longest running successful experiments in sustainable human land use are found within the collectively held lands of traditional communities, who have lived for generations in balance with the ecosystems of their ancestral territories. Looking to Indigenous socio-ecological systems, traditional knowledge, and integrated interpretations of what “nature” is and how to live in balance with the natural […]

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Breathing in the Time of Corona

Can we heed the warning, heal our collective grief and find our way back to equilibrium?

As I write, the church bells across the plaza are clanging a noisy celebration of the rising sun; another day has begun here in Mexico, with the same alegría, the same joy as any other dawn. It’s equinox, and I’m reflecting on equilibrium. That quality that allows us to hold fast onto the delight in […]

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Protecting our Guardians in Oaxaca

Celebrating and honoring Native Corn and Indigenous Defenders of Earth’s Biodiversity

It was an unusual Calenda (traditional procession) even for Oaxaca, a city used to these colorful, musical and boisterous parades often led by giant puppets (monos) and a marching band for weddings, quinceañeras, and religious observances.  This specific Calenda was dedicated to the protection of the guardians of native corn, to defenders of ecological diversity, […]

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Milpa in Mexico: Defending a Way of Life

UniTierra Founder Gustavo Esteva on the Defense of the Corn

Defending the native corn is a matter of life or death. To say that we are a people of corn is not a pretty metaphor, but rather, it is the state of things. Our life is associated with corn, and not just as a source of food. It defines a way of life and an affirmation of our relationship with Mother Earth.

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Regenerating Agriculture, Regenerating Communities

Vía Orgánica and Ecosystem Regeneration Camps Lead the Way in San Miguel de Allende

Don Manuel García Pacheco stands at the edge of the field he has known since his birth more than six decades ago, when the land was plowed by oxen. He smiles broadly as he surveys the industrious crew that has come from all over the world to work in his cornfield. “Estoy feliz como un lombriz,” he declares in typical campesino parlance – I’m happy as an earthworm.

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Heathy Children, Healthy Future in Ecuador

Indigenous Kañaris place the child at the center of the Andean world — and their commitment to a return to food sovereignty

Indigenous Kañaris place the child at the center of the Andean world

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Lyla June on the Forest as Farm

Science reveals that ancient foodscapes were cutting-edge regenerative agriculture

Science reveals that ancient foodscapes were cutting-edge regenerative agriculture

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Kelp Gardens, Piñon Forests  

Lyla June on Renovating Native Foodways as a Path to Sovereignty

Lyla June on Renovating Native Foodways as a Path to Sovereignty

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Lino's Dream

Creating a Kañari future based on tradition in the Ecuadorian Andes

Lino Pichasaca and I walked the rough footpaths, the chakiñanes in Kichwa, around the Hacienda Guantug in the province of Cañar, Ecuador. It was 1967, and the Ecuadorian agrarian reform was getting started. Leaders like Lino saw great possibilities and huge obstacles.

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Campesino Past, Biodynamic Future  

Cofounder of Mexico’s New Biodynamic Association Shares her Journey with Agriculture

Gaby Gonzalez is a soil scientist, an architect and a third-generation Mexican farmer, descended from a proud campesino grandfather and schooled by her father in the ways of modern industrial agriculture, an approach she found seriously flawed. The lessons she learned from both of them found a new meaning when she discovered biodynamic agriculture. Last […]

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Restoring the Earth, One Camp at a Time

Ecosystem Restoration Camps Founder John D. Liu on a mass mobilization to regenerate Earth's natural systems

Over the past 150 years, poor land management practices, driven by industrial agriculture, has resulted in the loss of half of the earth’s topsoil. Soil is becoming so degraded that some scientists are predicting that in some parts of the world, such as the UK, we only have 60 harvests left. More carbon has been […]

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Regenerating the Human Story

Mexico's Vía Orgánica restores soil, water, biodiversity - and the lives of its farmers, as well

Editor’s note: One of my most inspiring assignments so far this year brought together two important movements for the healing of the Earth: the first Ecosystem Restoration Camp in the Americas, and Vía Orgánica, the host organization. I went on to write about them both for Mongabay Latin America and the brand-new issue of Permaculture […]

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Restoring Paradise: Permaculture Meets Disaster Response

Grassroots groups seize opportunity after devastating California fires

As permaculture educator and community organizer Matthew Trumm was evacuating from the raging Camp Fire in Northern California last November, his mind turned to a video he’d seen recently with one of his heroes, the ecosystem restoration expert and filmmaker John D. Liu. Just the week before, Liu had invited him to serve on a […]

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Dismantling the Patrix with EcoSocial Design

An interview with Gaia University cofounder and author Andrew Langford

Andrew Langford has been practising the art of hands-on learning since his early days in manufacturing, and then in his first solo enterprise as a shoemaker. He came to formal university education a bit late, and perhaps that’s why he was able to look at it more objectively than his younger counterparts. It was while […]

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The Water Sowers of Oaxaca

Zapotecs of the Ocotlán Valley wage a groundbreaking battle for the defense of the aquifers

San Antonino Castillo Velasco, Oaxaca, Mexico — Twelve years ago in the verdant Ocotlán Valley of Mexico, a group of men and women of Zapotec origin watched as their crops of vegetables and flowers began to wither away. A long drought seemed destined to turn their fertile valley into a desert area. But through a […]

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